Cartoon courtesy Juliet Fay, "How the Grocer's Apostrophe led to generations of confused writers.” Web Source: http://carondann.com/tag/grocers-apostrophe/

Yes, I know. Irritating isn't it! But the number of people who do this is incredible. 

Working in a junior school it is something I come across every day. But then you would expect that - it’s one of the things the children are there for: to learn how to use apostrophes with contractions or possessives.

How many times have you been to a restaurant or café and seen apostrophes wrongly used on the menu? Or in a shop, or on a leaflet … I could go on.

What I can’t understand is why people don’t have their menu/leaflet/poster proofread before it goes to print - it makes it look unprofessional if there are silly errors. It isn’t too hard to remember that apostrophes are used:

• for possessive nouns: so if a noun owns something use an apostrophe, ie, Bob’s ice cream had melted in the sun’s heat

• when you use contractions: to shorten a word by removing one letter or more and substituting an apostrophe in the same spot, ie, Bob’s going to the shop to buy another ice cream

Remember - if it’s a plural do not use an apostrophe:

• ice creams always melt in the sun
• bananas are on offer today

The other problem with apostrophes is what to do if it is a possessive name ending in “s”:

• Chris’s bike was the best on the block
• Chris’ bike was the best on the block

Which is the correct way to use the apostrophe? Actually, both are acceptable, so long as you make sure you are consistent.

For possessive plural names, stick the apostrophe after the “s”, ie, “We travel in the Browns' bus when we visit the Joneses (members of the Jones family) at the Joneses' home.” When the last name ends with a hard "z" sound, you usually don't add an "s" or the "-es" but just add the apostrophe: "the Chambers' new puppy."

The most important rule to remember then is:

If it is a plural do not use an apostrophe

Interesting question.

I was taught to leave two spaces after a full stop, but that was in the days of manual typewriters (ooops - showing my age there!).

Typewriter characters had a monospaced type, which means every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space, giving you text that looked gappy with a lot of white space between characters and words. If you think of the difference in size between a lower case i or number 1 to a capital M or W you can see what I mean. It was harder to spot the spaces between sentences, so it was more usual to leave two (sometimes even three or four!) spaces after a full stop to make the end of sentences clearer.

When electric typewriters and computers came into being in the 1970s the characters used proportional fonts, which means the typeface contained characters of varying widths (Courier being the one major exception). These are easier to read and look more professional.

Because we now all use these modern fonts there is no need to leave two spaces after a full stop as it no longer enhances readability. This standard was adopted because editors, typographers, writers and others settled on it after years of experience.

Hard habit to break though ...